Archives for 2012

I’m about to run off for one last weekend with friends in another city before flying off to Korea. Therefore I’ll be taking a brief blog break from now until whenever I get sufficiently un-jet lagged/settled enough to actually have spare time. Probably sometime next week. Until then, a couple things. [Read more…]

Last week, Freethought Blogs picked up a new member, Libby Anne. She grew up in the Quiverfull movement, and her first couple of posts gave me a new perspective on the Catholics and contraception shitstorm. First, from her introductory post: [Read more…]

Update: For those of you who are reading this long after the fact, John has since apologized for some of his comments. Hi John, You’ve done some great stuff for the atheist movement. When I first reviewed your book (years and years ago, when I was still on blogspot and you were still self-publishing), I [Read More…]

Bill Vallicella thinks the Obama administration’s decision to require employer provided health insurance to include contraception is an example of how “The Left is totalitarian by its very nature.” That is, of course, completely insane. But when I read it, it made me pause and consider how liberals must sound to conservatives when they accuse [Read More…]

Probably the worst feature of the “fine-tuning argument” (mentioned last week) is that it’s always presented as an argument for the existence of God, which it plainly isn’t. It’s just an argument for some kind of designer or other. And “some kind of designer or other” might not be anything at all like God as [Read More…]

Well no, he isn’t. I ask only as a counterpoint to a Randal Rauser post from a few months ago titled “Is Daniel Dennet a conspiracy wingnut?” Rauser accused Dennett of being a “conspiracy theorist” for saying: [Read more…]

I promise to resist any urges to link to every good post Glenn Greenwald writes, because pretty much everything he writes is good, but I think he buried the lede on this post. Here’s what really stands out: [Read more…]

I had been vaguely aware of this issue before, but after a reader contacted me about it, I did some searching and I have to say the accusations look credible. Here is the best summary I’ve found. Here is a quotation supposedly from Craig’s thesis: [Read more…]